8 – Presentation Formats

Publisher Summary When dealing with arbitrary data in today's information systems, five tasks must be supported by computer systems. Data formats encompass both content and descriptive data. Multimedia is the computer-based combination of different media elements. Another way to categorize different media is their appearance over time. Text and graphics don't change, video and music do. The former are static or time independent, the latter are dynamic or time dependent. Two areas may be identified in multimedia research: stand-alone applications and applications in distributed environments. Multimedia, in a narrow sense, is the combination of several media types in a computer-based application, which usually is organized into documents. Hypertext is characterized by the ability to navigate inside and among documents, as long as the application just deals with text. Multimedia applications are composed of media elements that consume either space or time, or both when presented to the user. Therefore, a multimedia programmer has to deal with both spatial and temporal composition. One area of multimedia research is determining to what extent multimedia techniques influence the ability of the user to recall information.